


5 Times Nate Fick Breaks the Rules of Ethics (But Not Rule 8.4d)

by goshemily



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: 5 Times, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Legal, M/M, PTSD, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-30
Updated: 2012-07-30
Packaged: 2017-11-11 01:54:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/473157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goshemily/pseuds/goshemily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU where after the end of the war Nate becomes a lawyer:</p><p>"Did you know that in jail you only get one call?" Brad asks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5 Times Nate Fick Breaks the Rules of Ethics (But Not Rule 8.4d)

**Author's Note:**

> What I wrote instead of taking notes in Professional Responsibility. Thank you times a million to [miss_begonia](http://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_begonia) for the beta, and to all of bookclub for letting me vent.

After Iraq, after Nate leaves, he doesn’t hear from Brad for a long time. Nate drifts in more ways than one, doesn’t sleep, breathes, runs, and tries not to close his eyes. He ignores his email except when he can’t, and even then he gives only one word answers to Mike’s increasingly worried questions. He deletes Ray’s texts unread. Brad never calls.

When Nate has started avoiding not just mirrors but also windows so he doesn’t have to see his reflection mis-drawn and unreal, and when he’s stopped ordering groceries online because he might have to sign for delivery with a shaking hand, Doc shows up. His mustache through the keyhole is such an anchor that Nate manages to open the door even across the gulf of his own uncertainty.

Mike’s in the passenger seat of a startling sky-blue pickup in the driveway, and he gets out when Doc leads Nate down to stand barefoot on the cement. The warmth of it is unnerving, too like desert sun in his eyes and too outside the way he lives in his body to be wholly real. He feels panicked and naked before them, sure his face is no longer his own, and he touches his hair to check it’s no longer than regulation. “Nate,” Mike says.

*

Sitting at the beach, with the coldness of their beer a tether to this moment, Nate loathes himself and is pitifully glad for their kindness. He puts Brad away into the small spaces, into the emptiness of his palms and the hollowness of his bones, but is grateful in the ache of his throat that Brad is not here. Right now, Nate is not the LT.

*

He gets better if that is a thing that can happen. He sleeps sometimes. He runs. He tries to put the world and his head together in a new way.

Nate goes to law school in part to fill the chasm of un-planned days and in part because his favorite Classics professor used to teach Roman law in the spring semesters. Nate likes it, how strong cases are new facts for old stories, how he can choose what story to tell, how once he does the path forward is always certain. He likes the strict symmetry of the tiers of desks circling one lecture podium. He likes the idea of helping people.

Nate becomes an Assistant District Attorney in Los Angeles, and he’s dogged and sure and careful and does well for the people of California for whom he states his name to the court. He enunciates. He begins to prosecute homicides, and feels a fierce and sudden gratitude.

*

In his office, on a Monday morning at 9:17 while Nate is wearing a green tie and drinking his third cup of black coffee, his phone rings. “Did you know that in jail you only get one call?” Brad asks, voice laconic and taut together.

 

**1\. Rule 1.7 Conflict of Interest: Current Clients**

_(a) Except as provided in paragraph (b), a lawyer shall not represent a client if the representation involves a concurrent conflict of interest...b) Notwithstanding the existence of a concurrent conflict of interest under paragraph (a), a lawyer may represent a client if...(4) each affected client gives informed consent, confirmed in writing._

“I’m on my way,” Nate says, before Brad does more than exhale.

“LT,” and Nate stops. He opens and closes his fist. One, two. “LT, it’s murder.”

“Murder.” He says that word all the time to juries, and to himself over and over like a mantra and a drive, but now it has no meaning. The two syllables are as disconnected from Brad as an MRE is from home. They are not even in the same reality (except that they are, and ‘murder’ like MREs tastes more like sand than like ash). “Where are you?”

“Men’s Central.”

“I’m on my way,” Nate says again. In direct examination, you cannot lead a witness. You take one step and then the next, small and shackled.

“You can’t come,” Brad says. “You’re a DA.”

“Shut the fuck up.” He can inhabit this. “Brad, don’t talk to anyone. Did they read you Miranda?”

“Yes.”

“Did you say anything?”

“That I wanted to call a lawyer.”

“Don’t say anything else. If you talk, they’ll find a way to use it.” Nate doesn’t say ‘we’ll find a way.’ He makes himself not listen for “solid copy” and hangs up fast, walks out of his office faster, and runs to Steve Cooley’s secretary. “I need to see the DA,” he says. But no, Cooley’s in a meeting, they’re all supposed to go to the meeting, Nate never liked Cooley anyway – “Never mind. Can I leave him a message?”

The secretary nods. Nate smiles unmeaning and out of habit, but Ms. Fenton is new, photogenic and hired for the campaign and deserving better than a boss whose website trumpets an “unambiguous” support of the death penalty. “Thanks.” He carries pens still. This part is easy. Brad’s “one call” chases “murder” around and around inside Nate’s skull.

_Mr. Cooley,_

_I quit._

_Nathaniel Fick_

 

**2\. Rule 1.4 Communication**

_(a) A lawyer shall…(3) keep the client reasonably informed about the status of the matter._

Brad is shockingly unfamiliar in orange, his face impossible to reconcile with all the other defendants Nate has seen. He fills the interview room with his straight spine and his calm mouth, all Iceman except for the tightness at his eyes. He starts to stand when Nate comes in and can’t, yanked and appalled and crouching over the manacles that draw him down to the table.

“At ease,” Nate whispers and Brad sits, scoots forward, one motion to regain balance. Nate nods at the guards and they leave. “Hello, Brad,” he says level, and this is wrong so much but not least because Nate’s mind is yelling at his skin, the onslaught of the convulsions of responsibility. He is scared by how easy it is to give orders. He is scared by how steady Brad seems now that he has. 

“Sir.” Brad is clipped and straightforward, back in himself except for tension in his hands. Nate wants to touch Brad’s knuckles. He wants to be good at this. He wants not to be here.

“I’m not that anymore, Brad.” Nate catalogs himself wry and amused. “I’m just your lawyer.”

Brad looks at him. He knows as well as anyone that you can’t prosecute and defend together. Nate has to remind himself that it is too warm in this concrete box because they are in Los Angeles, not because they are in Baghdad.

*

There was a shooting off-base. There was a fight at a bar, two days home and tired, and Brad doesn’t even know why he started it. “He offended my warrior spirit,” he says about the dead man, smirk affixed. Everyone saw them get thrown out. No one saw them after. Nate grips his own knee under the table, something to hold onto because he doesn’t have a helmet.

“It was different this time.” Brad is here now, willing him to understand, and all Nate can do is nod like the liar he is. He doesn’t know how the war was different. He guesses it was worse, but guessing isn’t the same as having been in it with Brad.

“Nate” – that’s new, uncharted and Nate wants not to be wildly and inappropriately human – “aren’t you going to ask me if I did it?”

“No,” Nate says.

“Nate –”

“We’re going to be fine, Brad.”

 

**3\. Rule 1.6 Confidentiality Of Information**

_(a) A lawyer shall not reveal information relating to the representation of a client unless the client gives informed consent, the disclosure is impliedly authorized in order to carry out the representation or the disclosure is permitted by paragraph (b)…(b) A lawyer may reveal information relating to the representation of a client to the extent the lawyer reasonably believes necessary…(1) to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm._

Nate goes before the guards lead Brad away and he sits in his car for a long long time. He stares at the prison wall cold and regimental and a blockade against evil.

Prisons are not rehabilitative. Sometimes Nate agreed to plea bargains for community justice centers or drug treatment programs, and sometimes he didn’t. To be a good DA you must know mercy, but also that some people are beyond saving. Murders are best to prosecute, the canyon between right and wrong mostly unbridged and the defendants easier to hate. Now Cooley’s death penalty crusade is laid against Brad’s airplane arms.

Nate doubles over. Then he sits up, locks everything away, and drives.

*

Time is compressed down into the weeks before the preliminary hearing, and Nate gets calls again from Ray and Poke as well as Doc and Mike. He can’t avoid the firefight of their questions, but all he answers is that he can’t tell them anything. “Yeah?” Ray says with no venom but with a rage that Nate feels in his limbs. “You fuckers are so stupid. How are you so stupid? You won’t talk, Brad won’t let us visit, and I _know_ he’s not getting conjugal from anyone else –” which becomes a different tirade, but Nate knows that Ray means he hates helplessness.

Brad sits through lawyer-client meetings with his head high and his face blank. Nate does not ask if Brad killed the man. Brad does not ask again if Nate wants to know.

They exist in lateral moments of going over demeanor and testimony. Brad says he went home drunk to sleep. No, he has no alibi. No, there was no particular reason for the fight. No, Brad doesn’t know what happened to the dead guy. Yes, Brad trusts Nate. Nate might be fooled by that answer except he’s spent more time watching Brad than he has ever had a right to. “Stay frosty, Brad,” he says always, nods briskly, and walks away.

He oscillates: Brad didn’t do it or he did it out of his mind and snapped, one too many swallowed responses in his life to stand another. Every day when Nate gets home he changes clothes and shoes and stretches and goes, eating miles and not thinking except about reasonable doubt.

*

Nate tilts. He isn’t safe. Brad is his trigger and the finger on his gun. He thinks about the size of Brad and what that means rather than what it will mean to sacrifice Brad on the altar of his own incompetence. He stands in the shower in the morning, hot water hitting his shoulders and jerking off to the idea of Brad in the ocean.

He dreams vivid touches and vivid deaths. He kills Brad over and over and over. It’s not subtle: Sappho and Caligula and Brutus. Discovery gets him nowhere. No one has anything to say about enemies of the dead man, and cameras are nothing except Brad following the guy from the bar. Somewhere in the space of Nate leaving the Corps, Brad grew shadows, and Nate can’t tell if they’re from Afghanistan or Iraq or murder or prison or him. He doesn’t find Brad a different lawyer. Brad asked him for this.

Three days before the hearing, he focuses on Brad’s left cheekbone and doesn’t meet his eyes. He thinks _We are here_ and doesn’t watch Brad watch him. “Nate,” Brad says. “Nate, I want – ” and stops like a bomb. “I know,” Nate says.

He goes home and puts his fist through his kitchen wall. Then he calls Evan Wright.

 

**4\. Rule 3.4 Fairness To Opposing Party And Counsel**

_A lawyer shall not: (a) unlawfully obstruct another party’s access to evidence…(d) in pretrial procedure, make a frivolous discovery request or fail to make reasonably diligent effort to comply with a legally proper discovery request by an opposing party._

What Nate learned from _Rolling Stone_ is this: Evan is an emotional extortionist and an asshole. He saw Nate’s men as other. What Nate remembers from Iraq is this: Evan as a nervous puppy, wide-eyed and admiring and wanting to belong. Nate would like to pity him, but he’s too tired.

What Nate wants is for the noise in his head to go away. He wants not to be made of amputated and excised pieces. He wants to argue over waffle irons and be normalized. He wants to sit reading in low light and feel the back of his neck prickle because Brad is in the doorway looking. He wants Brad to come home.

It is too much and on the phone he begs.

*

The night before the preliminary hearing, Nate feels tenuous like he’s lying in his childhood bed or his grave. He hasn’t heard from Evan.

*

He stares at himself while he shaves in the morning. The razor helps him reconstruct; self-pity is boring and grating and not worthy of Brad. Nate recites the invocation from _The Iliad_ in his head, the Fifth Sixth Eighth Amendments, builds _Strickland v. Washington_ and the right to adequate counsel into his posture. He drives to the courthouse.

All Nate knows how to say is that Brad does not bear the burden of proving his own innocence. Nate wanted to be a citizen soldier. Instead he is the only shield Brad has between a misplaced faith and Cooley. Mario Cuomo said that men ought to campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Going to meet Brad in the holding cell, Nate has neither.

Brad is implacable, the same veneer that kept Bravo 2 in line. Nate runs his tongue over his teeth, expecting to find sand. “Ready?”

“Are you?”

“We’ve got a shot. We’ll do our best.”

Brad looks up at him from the bench. “You’ll tell them I didn’t do it, though, Nate.”

Brad is not that unaware. He can’t be. He knows that counts for nothing. “Brad,” Nate says, firm footing, “you know I can’t say that.”

There is a breath where Brad is galled, gallows, face an aftermath. Then he says “You were the only thing.”

He leaves, follows the guard into the courtroom and to the defense table. Nate sits on the bench in the cell. He leans his head against the wall. Brad stopped yelling at Walt and took Trombley’s guilt on himself and watched villages burn without joy. Schwetje pulled them from the road. Godfather kept them there. Nate did not get them back to it. He knows he is not all things to all men, and that only officers reassign their own shame.

It wasn’t Brad. Nate cracks like a riverbed with no water.

*

A preliminary hearing is held so a judge can decide if there is enough evidence to bring a case to a jury, if there is probable cause to believe that Brad killed a civilian on American soil. Nate enters the courtroom from the cell and walks straight to Brad and says “I’m sorry.” This is his center.

He knows Ray and Poke and Rudy and Doc and Mike will be waiting in the tired linoleum hall wearing suits, camouflage in the wrong color. He goes to greet them before Brad can acknowledge him.

Evan yells “Nate!”

*

It is right that Evan is Brad’s savior, that Evan running with a sheaf of pages is the difference between a hanging offense and a pardon. Nate alone could not win. Evan vibrates all over, faint pride and embarrassment that he was useful where Nate couldn’t be, that people who wouldn’t trust Nate trusted him. Nate twice interviewed the same woman who then gave Evan a full statement. When Nate reads her deposition, he breathes out, jaw clenched against another failure. When he presents his evidence, it is all Evan’s.

“Your Honor, I would like to turn your attention to the testimony of Jane Brett – ”

“Objection! Hearsay!”

“Overruled. This is preliminary, counsel. Continue, Mr. Fick.”

Judge Hill speaks in a low, cool voice and watches with neutral eyes. Nate is across from Peter North. Their offices used to be adjacent. North is a small man who reminds Nate of no one so much as Griego.

“Your Honor, _People v. Colbert_ needs to be dismissed. In her deposition, Ms. Brett describes a third party confessing to the murder. Mr. Colbert is innocent.”

“Who is Ms. Brett, Mr. Fick?”

“The girlfriend of the murdered man’s best friend, Your Honor.”

“And why do you have her statement when Mr. North does not?”

“Your Honor, I gave it to the prosecution as soon as I got it. We had a strict burden-shifting defense, technical innocence as actual, until –” he feels like a marionette with strings cut “– about ten minutes ago.”

“How lucky for you, Mr. Fick. Mr. North? Do you have a response?”

North springs up outraged and a hammer. “Yes, Your Honor, I do! This completely contravenes the rules of discovery! This is pure fabrication to get his client – his subordinate, and there’s a _definite_ bias argument there, _I_ don’t know their relationship but Fick quit his job for Colbert – off the hook! In the Model Rules –”

“Fuck that. I never went to Professional Responsibility.” Nate slices the courtroom. “I don’t care if the ABA requires it. That class was useless. _People v. Hill_ , Your Honor. Attacking the integrity of defense counsel is an attack on the defendant and is inexcusable. _People v. Jackson_. Courts should guard against emotional argument. Due process. He’s putting the defendant on trial for my failure to show him a document that I didn’t even have before today.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning objection, misconduct. Meaning lack of evidence alone should exonerate Mr. Colbert, but further that with this testimony he _can’t_ be held.”

*

Freedom is before them. The men know. Ray crowed and Poke wondered aloud if Nate is planning to use his fucking prow _ess_ , dog, to volunteer for the downtrodden as well as the white man. There is paperwork now, and Brad is getting his belongings back.

Nate stands in the courthouse bathroom, echo to his shaving self, except now he doesn’t look in the mirror. His thumbs are curled around the porcelain sink and he is aware of them as separate from him, autonomous and cradled by muscles and grace. He stands knees locked. He wants to sit on the floor.

Brad comes in. “I’m sorry,” Nate says. “I should have trusted you. I’m sorry.” He wants to apologize for everything, for not believing in Brad, for risking Brad’s life against the impossibility that anyone should trust Nate, ex-DA and ex-CO.

“Yes, sir,” Brad says. Nate risks looking, and Brad is very still. “My landlord probably turned the water off, and I really fucking want a shower.” He offers it, mouth unhappy. They leave together.

 

**5\. Rule 1.8 Conflict Of Interest: Current Clients: Specific Rules**

_(j) A lawyer shall not have sexual relations with a client unless a consensual sexual relationship existed between them when the client-lawyer relationship commenced._

When they get through Nate’s front door all he can feel is the absence of Brad’s hands on him, fingers in him, regard. He stands in his hallway and says “Glad that’s done,” calculates the quirk of his grin. Sleep debt and relief and the memory of becalmed deserts make him selfish. Brad is in front of him and Nate wants so badly that he flees. Abrupt turn, kitchen, with his back to Brad he says lightly, “Beer? Or would you rather shower first?” He is so _obvious_. He’s left half his mind in the courtroom and half his mind in Iraq.

“ _Nate_ ,” Brad says. “Nate.” Nate swivels reluctant and their eyes hold. “Thank you.”

Nate knew how to read Brad in combat. He learned how to read Brad in prison. He doesn’t understand how to read Brad here, in Nate’s own house.

“I think you know how we – how I – think of you,” Brad continues. Nate shakes his head. “You’re our – my – LT.” Brad takes a step closer out of the hallway and toward Nate. “But that could change.” 

“It can’t,” Nate says. He presses into the wall behind him. “Shut up, Brad. Shut up.”

“Nate.” Brad takes another step.

“We can’t. You can’t be grateful –”

“I’m not. That was stupid, Nate.”

Nate doesn’t say _I’m not all right_.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Brad says. He sounds hoarse. He stands squarely in front of Nate and breathes in, out. It’s the first time since they left the courthouse that Nate remembers Brad is not well either. Typical command, forgetting the grunts are human. He closes his eyes.

This is scorched earth. This is a war of attrition.

He feels to his core the air move and the sound of Brad’s knees on his tile. “Okay,” Nate says.

It’s not sudden. Brad runs his warm palms up the back of Nate’s legs slowly, undoes his pants, fists Nate’s cock. Brad closes his mouth around Nate and Nate hears the echo of gunfire in his head and opens his eyes and looks down. All the things he wants are coalesced here, Brad’s warm mouth and bracketing hands. It doesn’t last long, Nate not pushing but cupping, stroking the pads of his thumbs over Brad’s still-shorn hair. He can feel his pulse jump in his collarbone.

He comes in Brad’s mouth and Brad swallows and rises, draws his shirt over his head, and stops when he sees Nate’s face. He drops his shirt and they look at each other. “Please,” he says. He is rigid and unsure. Nate is still clothed, pants, shirt, tie, he’s still wearing his jacket and shoes and he feels naked. Brad doesn’t unknot his boots or take off his jeans.

Nate thinks about compasses. He thinks about Babylon. He turns to the wall and Brad crowds in, undoing his own belt and kissing him. Their teeth click and Nate’s neck hurts at this angle. Brad takes his jacket, a slide that has his fingers digging into Nate’s arms. Nate pulls off his tie and is stripped, a deliberate unbuttoning of his shirt, and then Brad is kneeling again to untie Nate’s laces. Nate leans on crossed arms and lets himself be moved, Brad slipping off Nate’s shoes and everything else. Before Brad sets each foot down he caresses the arch. 

He stands and wraps himself around Nate, nose at his neck and hand at his mouth. Nate tongues Brad’s fingers. Brad doesn’t push. He doesn’t speak. The cathedral of his hands sanctifies. To their left is a hole in the wall the size of a fist. 

When he strokes Nate open, it is pattern recognition. Nate listens to Brad breathe. With the fingers of his left hand he touches Brad’s knuckles and the calluses of his palm. Nate is raw and inarticulate and Brad holds his wrists.

Brad moves in him, cock long like his fingers and what feels like a smile against Nate’s jaw when Brad mouths over it. Nate can’t get enough air. Brad jerks him off, comes in him and bites his shoulder and Nate shudders and comes again in Brad’s hand.

They stay locked together and Nate thinks about tomorrow. “Don’t leave,” Brad whispers. His head is bent to the top of Nate’s spine.

Nate looks down at their entwined hands. He turns. “Come to bed,” he says.

 

**Rule 8.4 Misconduct**

_It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to…(d) engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice._

**Author's Note:**

> The American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct are [here](http://www.abanet.org/cpr/mrpc/mrpc_toc.html). John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” is [here](http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php). (Also, disclaimer: some of this was written during the election of California’s next Attorney General. The bit about Steve Cooley’s website is true.)


End file.
